- Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
- Written by Kiah Roache-Turner
- Stars Jermaine Fowler, Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMNOaJOWICo
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
What’s worse than spiders? Spiders from space! In addition to the creep factor, this has a lot of dark humor and offbeat characters. The story is a little basic, but they dress it up nicely into an entertaining film.
Spoilery Synopsis
We hear that an asteroid passed near to Earth yesterday, and today it’s unusually cold outside– it’s a very rare ice storm. We watch an old woman knitting– until she hears something upstairs running around. She pulls out an [antique] phonebook to call an exterminator. We see from the notes on the wall that it looks like she has Alzheimer’s.
Frank the exterminator comes by but the “Bug Brothers” are parked right outside. Frank warns the confused Helga about the green snot coming out of her vents. He hears the noise right away and goes in to check it out. He finds a blood trail in the back bedroom and a “Bug Brothers” hardhat before he starts screaming. Something drags him back into the room and closes the door. Old Helga forgets all this and goes back to her knitting. She hears banging noises and calls an exterminator…
Four days earlier, we see a meteor crash down into Helga’s apartment building, and a big spider hatches out of it as Credits Roll. A kid breaks in through the ventilation shaft and finds the spider; she puts the spider in a matchbox and Gunter, a mean-looking old woman, comes in. As she crawls through the ducts, we see the other people who live in the building. We see that the girl is Charlotte, and she’s Ethan the apartment manager’s stepdaughter. Gunter is her grandmother who owns the building. Her mother is Heather.
Charlotte names her spider “Sting” and feeds it other bugs. Charlotte’s other grandmother is the addled Helga, who watches horror movies and knits all day. Charlotte wrote a comic book, and Ethan drew it, and it’s become quite popular. They are working on the next issue. Sometime during the night, the spider gets into the vents. Not long after, something eats Gunter’s parrot in a really gnarly way– it’s partly melted and half-eaten.
Ethan calls Frank the exterminator. He’s sure it’s not rats and that whatever it was, it came through the ducts. We soon see that Charlotte’s spider is back in the jar and that it really hates mothballs. Frank and Charlotte talk about pets; he says spiders only know “Eat” and “Kill,” they can’t love. Charlotte continues feeding Sting, and Sting is getting bigger.
Maria is doing things in her apartment, and we see there’s a spider in there. It jumps at her, and she loses track of it. She’s been bitten, and soon falls down, paralyzed but not dead. The spider crawls down her throat then out her abdomen.
Ethan finds Maria’s dog in the ventilation shaft. He takes the dog back and finds what’s left of Maria. Charlotte goes to see Erik upstairs to buy one of his aquariums for Sting. She’s taught it to whistle, and Erik is a little creeped out. Erik is a weird biology student, and he wants the spider. Erik calls Ethan about the spider and it’s dangerous– and quite large.
Ethan confronts Charlotte about the spider, and she doesn’t take it well. They fight about her real father. Erik says he’s going to turn into the spider to the Department of Health, but he actually keeps it and feeds it bigger things from his specimens. It’s soon big enough to break out of the glass aquarium.
Gunter fires Ethan, her own son-in-law. Gunter says he’s weak and a quitter. That night, Gunter hears her cat in the hallway, but when she drunkenly crawls into the event, the spider gets her.
The spider jumps down and bites both Heather and Ethan. Charlotte’s got earphones on and misses all of it. It drags them away before she takes the headphones off. She does notice, however, when it steals her baby brother. She quickly makes a solution of mothballs in water bottles and loads pesticide into a squirt gun.
Gunter and Ethan wake up webbed and unable to speak. Charlotte checks on Helga, who is fine. Helga saw the spider, but it ran away from her– because she smells like mothballs. Charlotte finds Ethan next, and she works to release him from the webbing.
Frank shows up outside, and we’re back to the opening scene. We see that Ethan and Charlotte are in the basement and cornered by the spider. Ethan runs it off with the mothball-water. Frank comes rolling in through the vent and joins them. The spider comes back and gets Frank anyway. They soon find Heather and William and break them free.
The family lures the spider into the trash compactor and after a lot of desperate fighting with the wiring, they compact it. Ethan gets electrocuted, but Heather wakes him up.
Charlotte finally tells Ethan that she loves him, so it’s all going to be OK from now on. Then we cut over to a dark corner, where spider eggs are hatching…
Commentary
The many segues between apartments and characters are very smoothly done. We quickly get to know all the characters and their relationships, which is nice. The family drama is interesting, but there’s not so much of it that it detracts from the horror story. Unlike “Infested” (2024), there’s only one spider in this one, but it’s a big one.
It’s good!